ENERGY

Areas covered here and monitored for change and risk within Energy:

1.  Energy Return on Investment (EROI) 

2.  Math of energy needed for current human society (US and the World)

3.  Energy equals Wealth

4.  Disorder and its costs to US and the World 

5.  Human Approach - Avoid towards Energy

DETACHED OBSERVANCE STATEMENT #1

>  Excess Energy is Vital to Society Survival and Growth 

EROI = Energy Return on Investment

EROI = Quantity of Energy Supplied/Quantity of Energy Used in the Supply Process

Summary of EROI

EROI — Energy Return on Investment — measures how much usable energy society receives compared with the energy required to find, extract, process, transport, build, maintain, and deliver that energy.  If an energy source has an EROI of 20:1, it means roughly 20 units of energy are obtained for every 1 unit invested in producing it.  EROI is important because modern civilization does not just need energy—it needs a large surplus of energy left over after the energy system itself has been supplied. That surplus supports transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, technology, education, infrastructure, and the broader economy.

Monitoring EROI for change and risk helps show whether energy is becoming easier or harder to obtain.  If EROI declines, more of society’s energy, capital, materials, labor, and infrastructure must be devoted simply to producing energy, leaving less available for everything else.  Falling EROI can therefore contribute to higher costs, lower productivity, greater resource use, more infrastructure requirements, and increased vulnerability to disruptions. 

For a Change & Risk Map, EROI is valuable because it connects energy quality to economic resilience: two energy sources may produce the same amount of gross energy, but the one requiring much more energy and material input provides less net benefit to society. The key question is not only “How much energy do we have?” but also “How much useful energy remains after we obtain it?”

Humans, plants, and other living organisms must continually obtain enough energy to support survival, growth, reproduction, and adaptation.  In simple terms, survival requires an organism to gain more usable energy than it spends obtaining and maintaining the resources it needs.

Animals across the planet constantly seek an energy surplus by balancing the calories gained from food against the energy spent finding, capturing, defending, and processing that food. Whether it is a predator chasing prey, a bird searching for seeds, or an herbivore grazing, survival depends on obtaining enough net energy to support movement, growth, body maintenance, reproduction, and recovery. When energy costs remain higher than energy gains for too long, the animal eventually loses the ability to survive and reproduce.

Plants also depend on creating an energy surplus, primarily by capturing sunlight through photosynthesis and converting that energy into chemical energy they can use and store.  That captured energy must exceed the energy required for respiration, maintenance, root growth, repair, reproduction, and competition for water, nutrients, and light.  When plants consistently capture more energy than they consume, the surplus supports growth, seeds, fruit, larger root systems, and continued survival.

Across life, the pattern is consistent: survival requires energy, but growth and resilience depend on having energy left over after basic needs are met.

DO:  Societies, Organizations, and Individuals will have various levels of approach and avoid based on their excess energy equation.  At all three levels, there will competition and cooperation to obtain this surplus energy.

The Power of Surplus Energy

All living systems depend on gaining more usable energy than they spend obtaining it, and modern human civilization operates on the same basic principle at an extraordinary scale. Society today uses hundreds of exajoules of energy each year, and when that energy is converted through engines, machines, electric motors, factories, vehicles, and infrastructure, it provides a level of physical work that humans could never supply with muscle power alone—often described as the equivalent of hundreds of billions of additional human “workers.” 

The key to this system is not simply total energy, but surplus energy: the energy left over after the energy required to find, extract, process, transport, and deliver energy has been paid. EROI, or Energy Return on Investment, measures this relationship—how much usable energy society receives for each unit of energy invested in obtaining it. The higher the EROI, the larger the surplus available to power agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, healthcare, technology, infrastructure, and the wider economy; as EROI declines, more of society’s energy, capital, materials, and labor must be devoted simply to maintaining the energy system itself. 

This is why the mathematics of surplus energy matters so much: a civilization may have a large amount of gross energy, but its prosperity and complexity depend on how much net energy remains available to do everything else. 

DETACHED OBSERVATION STATEMENT #2

>  Human civilization depends on an enormous and growing flow of energy.  As population, technology, transportation, manufacturing, computing, infrastructure, and standards of living expand, society must continually secure enough energy not only to maintain what already exists, but also to support additional growth and complexity.

The Numbers on Energy

Recent global energy demand is on the order of 650 exajoules per year under the International Energy Agency's accounting framework.  Looking backward illustrates how rapidly the scale has increased: global total energy supply was roughly 373 EJ in 1995, 463 EJ in 2005, and 550 EJ in 2015, compared with about 654 EJ in 2024. That means today's energy system is roughly 19% larger than it was about 10 years ago, 41% larger than about 20 years ago, and 75% larger than about 30 years ago. Put another way, humanity has added roughly 281 EJ of annual energy demand since the mid-1990s—an amount itself comparable to the energy requirements of several large industrial economies combined.

The need for energy is also expected to continue growing, although the amount depends heavily on technology, efficiency, electrification, economic growth, and government policy.  The IEA's 2025 World Energy Outlook estimates that global energy demand could rise by about 8% to 15% by 2035, depending on the policy scenario, taking demand from roughly 654 EJ to approximately 705–750 EJ per year.  Its longer-term scenarios continue to show demand above today's level through 2050, reaching roughly 790–820 EJ in the principal scenarios. 

Because the IEA publishes scenario points rather than a specific 2045 forecast, a simple interpolation suggests that the world could be using on the order of 760–800 EJ annually by the mid-2040s—roughly 16% to 22% more energy than today—although this should be viewed as an illustration rather than a prediction.

The mathematics are important because even seemingly small annual increases compound into enormous physical requirements. An energy system growing only 1% per year becomes about 22% larger after 20 years, while growth of 2% per year produces roughly a 49% increase over the same period.  Every additional percentage point therefore represents enormous quantities of additional energy production, generation capacity, fuels, power plants, transmission lines, pipelines, minerals, equipment, capital, and infrastructure.  

Civilization is not simply replacing yesterday's energy system—it must maintain the existing system while continually adding enough new energy and infrastructure to satisfy additional demand. 

This is why total energy, the rate of growth, and EROI all matter: society's prosperity ultimately depends not only on obtaining more gross energy, but on maintaining enough surplus energy after the cost of obtaining that energy is paid to power everything else civilization depends upon.

DO:   The addition of "workers" added by energy is vital to society.  Since it is levered with these energy "workers", any threat to the energy equation is a threat to a leveraged society.  Since so much energy is now required just to maintain status quo, a threat to energy can also be seen as a threat just to the status quo, not including any growth in prosperity.

DETACHED OBSERVATION STATEMENT #3

>  Energy equals wealth -  Modern society depends on abundant, affordable, and reliable energy to produce food, move people and goods, manufacture products, heat and cool buildings, provide healthcare, operate technology, and maintain infrastructure.  

Energy and Wealth

Energy and wealth are closely related because nearly every good or service requires energy somewhere in its production, transportation, delivery, or use.  Abundant energy—especially when it produces a large surplus after the energy required to obtain it is deducted—allows machines to perform enormous amounts of work, increasing productivity and enabling societies to support greater economic complexity and higher standards of living. When energy becomes more expensive or difficult to obtain, those costs can move throughout the economy through transportation, food, manufacturing, electricity, construction, and consumer prices, leaving households with less purchasing power and businesses with higher operating costs.

For this reason, energy availability, affordability, reliability, and EROI are important indicators of economic resilience and wealth creation, while sustained energy shortages or price shocks can become significant sources of change and risk. 

DO:  As we will continue to see, all these Big Picture Topics all relate to each other.  Having a method to monitor the basics of each provides a person better understanding of society.  That is why a good society Change and Risk Map should have all related categories together - Energy, Resources, Economy, Environment, Technology, and Global Village (how human society interacts with itself).

DETACHED OBSERVANCE STATEMENT #4

>  DISORDER -  Left on their own, physical systems tend toward greater entropy and less usable organization over time. Creating and maintaining local order—whether in a living organism, a building, a machine, an organization, or a civilization—requires a continual investment of energy. 

Monitoring Disorder

The laws of thermodynamics remind us that organized systems do not maintain themselves for free: over time, entropy increases, materials wear, structures deteriorate, heat is lost, machines become less efficient, and complex systems require continual inputs of energy to preserve order and function. 

This is why disorder is important to monitor—because every additional layer of deterioration creates an energy and resource burden on a society that is already using enormous amounts of energy simply to operate.  A city provides an easy example: buildings need repairs, roads crack, water pipes corrode, electrical grids require maintenance, bridges weaken, vehicles wear out, and waste must constantly be removed and processed; without continual energy, labor, materials, and investment, these systems gradually lose function. The same is true for factories, hospitals, data centers, farms, transportation networks, and even organizations themselves, where complexity, inefficiency, poor maintenance, and accumulated problems can increase the amount of energy required just to keep the system working. In this sense, disorder acts like a drag on civilization: the more deterioration, inefficiency, and complexity that accumulates, the more energy must be devoted to maintenance and repair instead of growth, innovation, resilience, or improved living standards. 

Monitoring disorder therefore helps identify where society is losing efficiency and where rising maintenance demands may begin to consume an increasing share of available energy and resources. 

DO:   Society, nations, organizations, and individuals are better served when unnecessary disorder is eliminated, reduced, or effectively managed, because disorder wastes valuable energy and resources that are needed to maintain order, support resilience, and improve future outcomes.  

DETACHED OBSERVANCE STATEMENT #5

>  Humans will APPROACH Energy Surplus -   Because energy surplus is essential to survival, growth, and reproduction, living systems continually orient toward conditions that improve access to usable energy and resources.  Individuals, organizations, and societies compete and cooperate to gain more secure access to energy, resources, technology, territory, trade, and wealth because these can provide advantages in survival, resilience, and standards of living. In this sense, much of human activity can be viewed as an ongoing effort to approach greater energy and resource surplus while avoiding conditions that threaten or reduce it. 

Approaching Energy Surplus

Human society is continuously approaching energy wherever it can be found, seeking to increase the amount of useful surplus available to support transportation, agriculture, industry, technology, infrastructure, and standards of living.  Around the world, nations and organizations are expanding oil and natural-gas production, mining coal and uranium, building nuclear plants, adding solar and wind capacity, developing hydroelectric and geothermal resources, improving batteries and storage, and investing in emerging options such as hydrogen, advanced nuclear, and fusion.

The common objective is not simply to produce energy, but to obtain more reliable, affordable, and productive energy with the greatest possible surplus after the costs of extraction, conversion, storage, and delivery are considered. In this sense, humanity’s energy system can be viewed as a global effort to continually approach new sources, technologies, efficiencies, and combinations of energy that increase resilience and preserve the surplus required to operate an increasingly complex civilization. 

Global Village aspect:  Since wealth (and thus hierarchy position, power, influence, higher change for survival, etc.) is correlated to energy, Nations, Organizations, and Individuals will seek energy surplus.  Most all conflicts around the world have this math of energy as a source of both cooperation and competition (conflict).

Society:   From a detached perspective, energy is one of the foundations of civilization because it allows societies to produce food, move people and materials, operate infrastructure, manufacture goods, provide healthcare, and support technology and economic activity. 

>  Have a way to measure EROI and other means to know where society is in terms of energy availability and flow.  

>  Monitor all sources of energy with positive and negative impacts.

>  Avoid the purposeful destruction of energy sources (With lowering EROI of an energy source built millions of years prior).  Similar to wasteful spending out of a bank account that is not being funded.  

>  Spend resources in education and technology to raise the bar for the energy sector.

Organizations:  Every organization ultimately depends on energy, whether directly through electricity, fuel, buildings, machinery, transportation, and technology or indirectly through employees, customers, suppliers, and global supply chains. Rising energy costs, declining energy surplus, unreliable supply, or increasing disorder can appear as higher operating expenses, supply shortages, transportation problems, infrastructure failures, inflation, reduced customer purchasing power, and greater pressure on employees.

Only a few organizations and individuals have a large sway in the recommendations from the society section above.  Most everyone is subject to the resulting actions of a limited amount of nations, organizations, and people.  

As such, here are the recommendations for organizations:

>  Map EROI when available along with signs of a waning societal EROI on energy sectors.

>  Monitor energy prices, electricity reliability, fuel availability, trends, supplier exposure, transportation costs, infrastucture conditions, energy efficiency, geopolitical events, and areas where disorder is increasing jeopordizing order in a leveraged system.

Individuals:  Every person also operates within an energy system: people require biological energy to survive and limited mental and physical energy to work, learn, make decisions, maintain health, manage finances, and adapt to change. Individuals are affected by society's energy surplus through the cost and availability of food, housing, transportation, electricity, healthcare, employment, products, and other necessities, while personal disorder—financial stress, poor health, excessive complexity, unresolved responsibilities, or wasted time—can consume additional limited energy. 

>  An individual can map energy and utility costs, inflation, job security, transportation expenses, household debt, health, time demands, information overload, and the amount of personal energy being consumed simply maintaining daily life. Looking at change through this lens can help a person recognize that energy is limited, surplus is valuable, and unnecessary disorder has a cost, encouraging more deliberate decisions about where to invest time, money, attention, and effort as conditions change.